


The Other Things We Never Knew About Frodo's Soulmate

by Tozette



Series: Soulmate AU Challenge Fics [3]
Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 22:50:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8420206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: Primula was red-faced and exhausted by the end of the birth, and if she made a rude gesture at her husband and turned away sleepily, well, the midwife had seen worse.So Drogo was left holding the baby in bemused confusion. As new parents are wont to do, he counted all the toes and fingers, marvelled at the child’s eyes, and then set out looking to see if there was yet a soul mark on his son’s skin.There was.The script was all long tails and swoops that ended in jagged flicks with characters that seemed more made of unpronounceable accents than actual letter, but the hand that wrote it was smooth and practised, almost mechanical in its precision."Curious," said Drogo, peering at the mark upon his thigh. "I've never seen anything like it."The midwife seemed baffled by it, too, and when Primula woke he showed her and then they were three for three.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the writing challenge I've imposed on myself over on tumblr. If you wanna check out what I'm up to, you can find the rules [over here on my personal blog](http://tozettewrites.tumblr.com/post/152004964326/soulmate-aus-writing-challenge-to-myself). I think the most important thing to know is that it does mean that anything posted as a result of the challenge _has not been edited_. It is raw, and like raw food, may be less appetising than when cooked.
> 
> This fic in particular contains a pretty weird mix of book and film canon, which is a thing I am aware of.

Frodo Baggins was born to Drogo and Primula Baggins, sometime in the year 1368 by Shire reckoning (which was of course quite different to the years as they were measured by elves and men).

Primula was red-faced and exhausted by the end of the birth, and if she made a rude gesture at her husband and turned away sleepily, well, the midwife had seen worse.

So Drogo was left holding the baby in bemused confusion. As new parents are wont to do, he counted all the toes and fingers, marvelled at the child’s eyes, and then set out looking to see if there was yet a soul mark on his son’s skin.

There was.

The script was all long tails and swoops that ended in jagged flicks with characters that seemed more made of unpronounceable accents than actual letter, but the hand that wrote it was smooth and practised, almost mechanical in its precision.

"Curious," said Drogo, peering at the mark upon his thigh. "I've never seen anything like it."

The midwife seemed baffled by it, too, and when Primula woke he showed her and then they were three for three.

It turned out that Frodo Baggin's mark was, ah, virtually untranslatable.

None of their more learned relatives could recall ever having seen its like, not even old Rosa Took. She was eleventy-two that year and very frail, but still quite sharp. Even she shook her head over the child, and declared she hadn’t seen anything like the script on his leg in all her many years.

Several of them thought this was a terrible sign, and must mean that Frodo would have to travel well beyond the Shire in his lifetime.

"Poor thing," murmured one after another, although Frodo, being an infant, was not particularly concerned.

(Mostly those so dismayed were of the Baggins stock. They were a family that had very conservative views about soul mates and disliked the idea of leaving their comfortable homes anyway. By and large, Primula’s family were more sanguine about these things. “At least he has a good excuse if he wants to get away from that stuffy lot,” one of them commented cheerily, and was hastily hushed.)

Somebody put forward the bright idea that it was a secret language, and so a short procession was made up to Bag End. Bilbo Baggins (who was very learned, even if he was a bit mad) had travelled extensively with those dwarves in the past, and so it was reasoned that he must be able to tell if the writing on baby Frodo's thigh was in their secret language.

"No," said Bilbo, shaking his head, "not Khuzdul, not at all. If anything, I should say it was an Elvish script -- it looks a very little like Quenya, which is the eldest of the Elvish tongues. I do believe I've seen that script somewhere before, though. Hmm. Hrm. Perhaps in time it will come to me?"

Nobody had a great deal of hope for that, given Bilbo's apparent madness, but Drogo and Primula sat with him for a respectable hour, drank his tea (a nice black, flavoured gently with bergamot), ate his delicious cakes (honey and poppyseed), thanked him for his time and took their leave in the appropriate fashion.

“If it had to be one of the Big Folk,” Drogo said bracingly on their way home, “at least the Elves aren’t so bad.”

Primula gave him some dire side-eye, because, like most of the Bagginses in the world, Drogo had rarely left his village and never the Shire proper. What he knew of elves could probably fill at most a few pages.

On the other hand, the few elves she’d met in her wilder youth (she had, in traditional Brandybuck fashion, gone on a walking holiday all the way to Bree once, and it was quite possible to come across elves travelling to the Grey Havens along that route, thank you very much) had seemed like good enough folk. She settled her baby more comfortably against her and held him tightly.

“With any luck it’ll be one of the Lindon folk,” she said. “And he won’t ever have to go too far.”

“Er,” said Drogo. There was a frozen second, and then, “yes, yes, quite right. Lindon.”

Primula gave him a look that was half fond, half exasperated. “In the west, Drogo.”

“Oh! Yes. Quite. West. Indeed.”

She rolled her eyes. “Perhaps Bilbo’s friend Gandalf will be able to read it,” she suggested finally.

“The fellow with the fireworks?” Drogo asked uncertainly.

“Oh yes. Quite the scholar, apparently. Bit mad, of course, but --”

“Yes, well, we know he’s one of the Big Folk who come to visit Bilbo --”

“Quite right, dear.”

But Bilbo’s friend Gandalf did not come by for many, many years.

Bit of an oversight, that.

* * *

Frodo's earliest dreams were of somebody muttering peevishly (for a given value of muttering that required no physical shape) about the disordered minds of infants. He didn't remember most of them, but they were there.

He had other dreams later, although far fewer than the other children with whom he grew up. Most of the children hereabouts slept at the same time and in the same quantities as their soul mates, and dreamed of them every night. They were mundane dreams, as far as Frodo could tell: baking bread, sowing seeds, hearthfires and harvest and autumn. These were proof that they shared a life with their soul mates, that they'd been matched with good honest Hobbits.

Frodo was different. When he did dream, he usually blinked his eyes open just long enough to see cold iron or black ash or blistering sun, and then everything went soft and dark again.

He did, rarely, get shared dreams like the others, but even those were -- not right. Not the same.

Once he dreamed of an enormous army. The ground shook with their passing and their war drums thundered, drowning out the shuddering beat of his heart. On and on they went, sprawling forever in a huge snaking trail of bodies and metal gleaming under the sun. And at the head of this leviathan was a man, a king, tall and fair with a clear high brow, come huge and mighty to storm his family's smial and take him away in chains.

“Curious,” murmured a voice, distant and detached, a second before the king’s hand fisted in his hair to drag him away.

Frodo woke up screaming, terrified of the surrender on his tongue, and raced to wake his parents.

"What," said Drogo, squinting.

"Darling, are you sure it was a shared dream?" Primula asked, sitting up and shooting an exasperated look at her husband.

"Pretty sure." But now, waking, he doubted. He chewed his bottom lip. “What if he’s hurt?”

“Oh, Frodo. I’m sure he’ll be all right,” she said, although she was not sure at all, and she got up to sit with him while he tried to get back to sleep.

He did, eventually, braced for the worst, but as soon as he opened his eyes upon that stern king of men he felt as though a veil fell before his eyes.

“No, no, don’t fret," said a voice in his dream, clear and bell-like, suffused with the warmth of a good fire.

Frodo blinked once, twice -- no, not like a veil. Fabric. It was fabric streaming soft and dark, a comforting shield between him and the army, and a second after that came the odd idea that it was, in fact, the hem of somebody’s cloak, which had swung before his face at their approach, blocking out the view.

So Frodo looked up.

The figure was tall and broad, bigger than any man he’d ever seen. Heat rose from him, the kind of tricky heat that seemed comfortable to start but left marks over time, red and sore. It was too hard to look directly at him, too much like looking into the sun, but some things were clear: he wasn’t a man, or an elf or a dwarf, and certainly not a hobbit. He looked like no orc or goblin Frodo had ever heard of, and that was when he basically ran out of designations.

“I sang you into being,” murmured the voice, soft and a little bitter, “and yet you surprise me. A creature to hold my soul and carry it through the long lonely days until the end of all things -- and here, what a queer, delicate, soft thing you are.”

Frodo had no idea what this really meant, but he felt the overwhelming urge to apologise. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. There might have been a squeak.

The figure hummed softly, then reached down and laid one huge hand against Frodo’s thigh, right where the mark was. It burned for a moment, filling the air with the smell of cooking meat and bringing tears to his eyes, but it was over almost before Frodo could yelp.

“Don’t whimper,” said the voice waspishly. “It’s unbecoming.”

“I don’t know your name.”

“You can’t read it, I suppose,” said the voice. “Probably for the better.”

“What? Why?”

There was a long silence. “Don’t speak of me to others,” he said finally. “If not for my sake, then for your own safety.”

“Because of him?” Frodo croaked, nodding past the shield of his soul mate’s cloak.

“Him?” Surprise. The figure glanced over his shoulder at the army and its stern king, quite as though he’d forgotten them. He shook his head, then, coolly he added: “No. That’s just a memory. He can’t hurt either of us now. He’s dead.”

The word hung flat and hard on the air between them _dead, dead, de_ ad, and it was the last thing his soul mate said to him that night.

When Frodo woke up, the mark on his thigh was gone and the whole room smelled of singed hair.

* * *

It wasn’t really gone, he decided. Certainly nobody could see it, and his parents were horrified to know that it had disappeared -- they assumed, of course, that whatever Frodo had dreamed that night had been the end of his soul mate. It was a fair assumption, all armies and gleaming steel and terror.

But when he ran his own hands over the place where the mark would be, the characters were still there: raised, warm to the touch, long and sweeping in that elegant hand. It just couldn’t be seen.

Frodo concluded, with the open-minded wisdom of children, that his soul mate had performed some kind of magic and left it at that.

Primula was pale and sad and cooked nothing but honey cakes all week. Drogo, on the other hand, began several conversations, none of which he really finished.

They all started with “You see, Frodo--” and progressed clumsily through an attempt to assure him that Loss Is A Natural Part Of Life and It Is Okay To Be Sad, but they did tend to get a bit lost around the ‘we’re pretty sure your soul mate is dead’ area.

“It’s all right,” he said finally, upon the fourth unsuccessful attempt.

“Yes,” Drogo said, catching this up and running with it, “it is, isn’t it? It’s _all right_.”

“Stop traumatising the poor boy,” hissed Primula, wide-eyed and strained, wielding a wooden spoon in Drogo’s direction, “and get me some more ground almonds from the Bracegirdles, would you? There,” she added, once Drogo had complained, found his jacket, shoehorned his heels into his walking shoes and made it out the door, “now he has something else to occupy himself with.”

Frodo smiled at that, and Primula gave him a grave look. The wooden spoon was no longer in evidence, but she did look terribly serious.

She smoothed his curls back from his forehead. “Sometimes terrible things happen,” she said, “and there’s no reason or excuse for them. There’s nothing you can do but pull up your socks and keep moving forward.”

He nodded.

She kissed his forehead. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

Then she went back to her honey cakes, and it wasn’t spoken of again.

Several times he opened his mouth to tell his parents that his soul mate wasn’t actually dead, but each time he thought of that warm, clear voice telling him _don’t speak of me to others._

So he didn’t speak of him to others.

It was a strange secret to keep, but it wasn’t hard. Frodo was excellent at keeping secrets; it came naturally to him.

Still, he’d learnt something from the whole business: his soul mate was _magic_.

He didn’t dream often, and when he did they were rarely the shared dreams of soul mates -- although sometimes, when he slept, he could hear the hiss of steam and the low grinding noises of heavy machinery, taste rust on his tongue.

He wasn’t quite sure they were dreams, though.

* * *

When Frodo was twelve, Primula and Drogo died in a boating accident. It was senseless and shocking, and half the Shire had opinions about it.

“ _Boating_ ,” said several of the Baggins elders, shaking their heads and clicking their tongues.

The consensus seemed to be that only people willing to risk death by drowning ought to go boating in the first place, and that it had been quite selfish of Primula and Drogo to do it when they had a young child at home.

“You’d think they’d be better than to burden their own poor relatives with their child,” sniffed one of the Sackville-Baggins lot at the wake.

And so Saradoc slipped a pin from Esmerelda Took’s hair to pin Mrs Sackville-Baggins’s skirts to her chair and winked at Frodo. Watching Lobelia get up, take her chair with her and land with her garters on display was the only good thing that happened that day.

He always had been one of Frodo’s favourite cousins.

The other favourite was Bilbo, who attended the funeral only briefly and didn’t remain for the wake. He was an odd one, a bit mad, but there was much more Took than Baggins in that Hobbit, and Frodo liked his stories.

Unfortunately he didn’t land under Bilbo’s guardianship until he was twenty-one.

He moved -- or was moved, one might say -- to Brandy Hall, where his mother’s sprawling family took good, if slightly haphazard, care of him.

The Brandybuck children were just as wild as the Tooks, and the Brandybucks’ laissez faire approach to child-rearing meant that they frequently got away with pranks and small deviances. No cooling pie was safe, no orchard unmolested.

The whole house here were a great bunch for dice and cards, especially after supper in the evenings when there was little other entertainment but it was much too early for bed. It was good natured, betting low only, and Frodo got steadily used to the rowdy noise of the lot of them yelling across the great dining hall to one another of an evening by the fire.

The games of the adolescents were a bit more vicious than those of their parents, and had to be kept out of sight. This kind of trouble was frequently hidden between big trees or behind outbuildings, with bets and forfeits of unwise scandalous kisses and deeply humiliating dares. Sometimes there was liquor, much stronger than the wine they drank at dinner, and an ill-gotten bottle was passed around the circle.

It wasn’t bad, all in all. Frodo was well fed, dressed and clean and educated alongside the other Hobbits there, and he played just as rough as the other children too. But he was also an unexpected addition to any family event, a sort of tacked on, “Oh, Frodo, right,” that occurred when somebody pointed out that he wasn’t looked after for this or that occasion.

And there were some things that were just plain trouble. He had nobody to go to when he had nightmares -- not shared dreams, just regular ones, the kind which could be soothed by a parent’s attention (and if Frodo’s childhood nightmares now took the tone of marching armies and a stern king dragging him by the hair, well, that was only to be expected). He had no parents to help him make gifts for his own name day celebration (although Menegilda Brandybuck always remembered to make his favourite honey cakes for dessert, when she was able).

These, however impactful in the life of a small Hobbit, were not really things to complain about.

For these years, Frodo’s soul mate was quiet -- _busy_ , actually, was the jumbled impression Frodo received. For years. And _years_.

Frodo’s soulmate was magic, but he was also very busy. Just constantly, completely, sleeplessly, relentlessly... busy.

“Are you _always_ busy?” he wondered once, when real dreams once more gave way to the growl of struggling gears and the stinging smell of something acidic.

“There’s a lot of work to do,” his soul mate said, a low voice that echoed in the caverns of Frodo’s mind. Then, after a pause, apparently realising it had been years: “Are you -- _well_?”

He asked it like it was a foreign thing, the idea that people had variable states of being.

“Yes,” said Frodo automatically, and then he thought better of it and said, “No,” and then he remembered that his soul mate was magical, busy and apparently _never slept_ but had still taken the time to enquire after his wellbeing, so he stopped again and said, “Yes.”

There was a long, confused pause.

Frodo panicked. “I’m well. Thank you,” he added in his politest tone.

“I ...see.”

“My parents died,” Frodo said finally. “But I’m not sick or anything.”

“Somebody killed your parents?” the voice asked, sharp and fast.

“No, they drowned.”

“Drowned? Not slain?”

“No,” said Frodo slowly. “Drowned. I don’t think anybody’s been murdered in these parts for --” Ever, presumably. Murder wasn’t really a Hobbitish pastime. Not at all respectable, really.

“Oh.” There was a long, uncertain silence. Frodo had the distinct impression that his soul mate just sort of _forgot_ about the specifics of mortality sometimes.

“It’s never pleasant to lose somebody,” he said, sounding very stilted indeed.

Frodo nodded, but didn’t say anything, because from the sound of his soul mate’s voice the strain of further conversation might actually kill him.

* * *

Frodo turned twenty-one, and Bilbo Baggins finally realised he needed to leave his smial and all his things to _somebody_ and sort of casually trotted over to Brandy Hall to adopt Frodo.

Frodo was not given a lot of choice in the matter, but the Brandybucks there greeted the idea with enthusiasm. More than one of them tugged him aside by the arm and quietly told him to suck it up because Bag End was a pretty thing to inherit and Bilbo was getting on near ninety-nine no matter how spry he seemed.

That was mercenary, but quite accurate, and Frodo didn’t have a lot of reason to stay anyway. It wasn’t like he’d met his soul mate here or as though he had an apprenticeship or anything.

So he went quietly and biddably, packed his things and moved up to Bag End. There, he found that his initial assessment of Bilbo Baggins was quite right: he was a bit mad, but he was harmless, and he told excellent stories besides.

Frodo rapidly came to like the old Hobbit for his own sake, but even before that it was certainly no great hardship to live in a beautifully made smial full of expensive things, old books and treasure. Bilbo, too, was an excellent cook and Frodo found himself finally learning the family recipes he had been too young for his parents to teach him before they died.

“They’re not Brandybuck recipes, mind you,” Bilbo would say. “In fact, I think this one’s not even a Baggins recipe. Don’t tell the Tooks, will you?”

“My lips are sealed,” said Frodo, and it was a relief and a delight to learn something so-- so familial and Hobbitish.

He learned, too, that Bilbo Baggins’s soul mate was dead, had died in a terrible battle in the far east, past Rivendell and the mountains. It went some way to explaining why Bilbo was a bit odd sometimes -- with half his soul lost to the halls of some secretive dwarven creator, it was no wonder he seemed mad.

Among his other curiosities, Bilbo had the strangest ring. He stuttered to mention it, and seemed strange and paranoid with regard to it as he was with no other part of his treasure. Frodo never really saw much of it, and certainly never touched it, but he knew that it was a magic ring, one which rendered its wearer invisible.

Bilbo didn’t show it to him. He was secretive and possessive. Frodo knew it existed, though, and that was a much greater degree of trust than most other Hobbits received. That would do.

Twelve years he stayed with Bilbo, mostly quiet and generally content, and during that time his soul mate warmed to him -- at least a little.

Unfortunately, warming to Frodo meant that instead of sweet nothings, he said things in Frodo’s dreams that were dire-sounding and quite ominous, more like:

“This, carrying a piece of me, it must be a hefty burden. The weight of my soul has driven Men mad, you know.”

“Erm,” said Frodo, bewildered, because _no he did not know that_. “I’ll... I’ll watch out for that?”

Dubious silence. “I’m not sorry for it.”

“I didn’t ask you to be? Although, actually, I’d like it if you could elaborate on that ‘driven Men mad’ bit at some point,” he added, but of course by then his soul mate was already gone for the night.

And equally discomforting, although slightly less baffling:

“Are you safe? Do you speak of me to anybody?”

“Yes. It’s the Shire, nothing happens in the Shire. And, no,” continued Frodo slowly. “Of course not.”

“Truly, though?” pressed his soul mate, a hint of something hot and suspicious bubbling up in his voice. “It is important. For both our sakes.”

“You asked me not to,” Frodo pointed out. It was a strange question, because -- well. There was only one person with whom he would ever share this connection, and it was a small thing to do. How important it was or wasn’t didn’t really signify -- the voice had _asked_.

There was an odd moment, a flicker of bright surprise, and then a tiny flame of delight.

“So I did,” said his soul mate, sounding much more pleased than Frodo had ever heard him. Really? Was that all it took?

Frodo squinted into the warm darkness of his dreamscape. He could hear yelling, and the screech of tortured metal, but his soul mate seemed unbothered by whatever was going on.

He was never around for very long, but he was impossible to ignore when he was. His presence was enormous and terrible, and whenever his attention drifted toward Frodo he swore he could feel it. Even awake, he felt it like some great shadow drifting between himself and the sun.

“I don’t suppose,” said Frodo once, “that you’d be willing to tell me how to read your name? Or even which language group to look at?”

A pause. “It’s a language derived from Valarin,” he said finally, and then there was a silence as though he already regretted saying it.

And, well, Frodo hadn’t the faintest notion of what Valarin even was, so he felt as though any panic on his soul mate’s behalf was pretty premature.

So Frodo’s picture of his soul mate developed nuance. He was magical, he was busy, and he was really _weird_.

* * *

Nobody else knew what Valarin was, either, excepting one Ranger who wandered in, injured by a nasty fall on the border.

Most of the Hobbits were determined to take good care of him without ever actually coming to know him, so when Frodo dropped by the inn where they were keeping him just to test the famous lore of the Rangers, he was more than happy to answer.

“I have heard of it, although it seems odd that a Hobbit should come across it. I believe it to be the tongue of the Ainur,” he said, “although I hadn’t known any still spoke it.”

Frodo’s smile became rather fixed after that. He remained for the forty-two more minutes required by every rule of etiquette ever pounded into his skull and then took his leave directly.

* * *

So Frodo’s soul mate was magic, busy, really weird and _probably an angel._

The innkeeper gave him a paper bag. “There now,” she said, wide-eyed, “he’s not that bad, is he?”

“No,” choked out Frodo between panicked breaths. “Not bad.”

She guided the bag to his face for him. “There, now, Master Baggins, let’s not be too hasty. Why don’t you take a seat? I’ll get you something.”

She provided him with a finger of brandy on the house, because Hobbit manners were something else.

“Lovely Man,” said Frodo, crumpling his bag in his white-knuckled grip. “Really... lovely.”

Aside from cooking and etiquette, there was one more thing Hobbits were really good at, and now Frodo took shameless advantage of it: Repress, repress, _repress_!

He went home and resolved not to think about it, and six days out of seven he was remarkably successful.

* * *

Bilbo’s eleventy first birthday came and went, taking with it the Hobbit himself. There was, Frodo understood, some struggle about the ring of invisibility, but Gandalf had at least shown up in time to prevent him from doing anything silly with it.

Frodo wasn’t sure what the silly thing he might have done with it _was_ , of course, but Gandalf seemed strange and twitchy and answered no questions.

Bilbo seemed immeasurably older when he set off, but Frodo reasoned that he was a hundred and eleven. It was only right that he begin to look old at some point.

Gandalf didn’t stay much longer, either. He stared forever into their hearth and refused all hospitality -- quite rudely, by Hobbit standards. When he left, he barked at Frodo to keep Bilbo’s old ring well out of sight and out of mind, and insisted that neither of them touch it at all.

“Er,” said Frodo. “Right. It’s just, I don’t really understand--?”

“Nor do I,” muttered Gandalf. For a moment before he left, he was wild and eldritch and Frodo could believe that he really was a wizard, capable of great and terrible feats.

Then he was gone and the ring was tucked away and Frodo basically forgot about it. It was just a ring. A fancy, magical ring, but really, he’d never quite understood the fascination with it.

The care and maintenance of Bag End -- and Bilbo’s associated lands and titles -- fell to Frodo now, and it was not the terrible burden that some of his more avaricious relatives seemed to feel it ought to be. He was of age now, and quite capable of taking care of his things, thank you very much.

Honest help was a lot more difficult, and much more valuable, to find. It was with no small relief that Frodo employed and kept on the son of the old Gaffer, a younger Hobbit named Samwise.

Samwise Gamgee knew his business, and he was careful and cautious and loyal to a fault. Frodo liked him, even if he did meddle a bit more than most gardeners really ought to. Despite the vast difference in their social classes, they got on.

If there was anybody Frodo _could_ tell about his soul mate, it was probably Sam.

Not that he would, of course, because his soul mate had asked quite specifically. And he was probably an -- nope. No. His soul mate had asked, that was the end of it.

The ring Bilbo left behind sat hidden in a chest, and most days Frodo didn’t even think about it.

His day to day life occupied him for the most part, filled with good food and minor frustrations and Sam’s steadfast presence almost every morning, and for the rest there were dreams.

“Making order out of chaos is taxing,” said the voice one night, intruding upon a dream Frodo had been having about his books’ numbers never adding up, which was more like real life than he cared to admit.

He gladly let the dream fade and freeze, turning his attention to the oddly plaintive tone of his soul mate. “How so?”

“There are apprentices in the forge,” the voice admitted, “and it is terrible.”

Frodo had little experience with ironworks, but he was familiar with young Hobbits learning to cook for the first time, and mostly he just transposed them into an environment filled with fire and molten metal and people flinging hammers about.

Really all he could do was offer his quite heartfelt sympathy, but as far as he could tell this was in itself a delightful novelty to his soul mate, who lapped it up.

This was one of the nights upon which it was easy to forget that his soul mate was probably an-- _nope_.

“Some of the family have started clucking about marriageable young Hobbit lasses,” he admitted in one dream, many months later.

“Absolutely not,” said his soul mate, although Frodo got the impression that he was diverted by something else. He was usually awake when Frodo spoke to him, although he did often pause to speak back. It was irregular, but it seemed to work.

“I’d prefer not, too,” Frodo agreed, even though he was fairly certain that had been an order and not a statement of preference.

The voice sniffed. “Just... tell them you’re still traumatised from the loss of your soul mate.”

“Do you think that would work?” Frodo wondered, but his soul mate was busy and there was somebody screaming bloody murder somewhere there, so he didn’t really get a response.

Nevertheless, he told Esmerelda exactly this when she visited. Her green eyes filled with tears and she flushed with embarrassment. And lo, about thirty minutes after she left, the whole of Hobbiton seemed perfectly aware that Frodo Baggins was still mourning his soul mate, which was a very serious thing indeed.

He cheerfully reported this result back to his soul mate. “That worked really well,” he added. “Are you always that good at predicting people?”

“Usually. It’s something of a gift,” murmured his soul mate.

Frodo nodded thoughtfully, and then he remembered time spent in Brandy Hall with ill-gotten wine, a gaggle of young Brandybucks and Tooks and a fifty-two card deck. “Do you play cards?”

“Cards?” The mental image that came along with this query was one of thin pasteboard, as though for standing upright to scrawl troop movements on.

Frodo thought, not for the first time, that his soul mate probably worked too much -- although whatever it was he _did_ remained a little elusive. Perhaps he was a seneschal or a steward somewhere?

Still, every Brandybuck child knew how to play twenty-one and draw poker. It seemed like a hole in his soul mate’s otherwise sterling education.

“You use them for playing games,” he said finally. “When you have some time, I’ll show you.”

There was a pause, surprised, and then, “All right,” said his soul mate, even as Frodo heard him thinking dubiously that games were for children and he was _so busy._

Frodo smiled.

* * *

Frodo’s soul mate was magic, busy, weird, probably a -- _nope, no, not that_ \-- and also a natural card sharp.

* * *

Then one night Gandalf arrived at Bag end, looking greyer than ever. He looked more like a vagabond than a powerful wizard.

“Gandalf,” Frodo said, surprised, but he let him in.

The old man let the door close, then whirled upon him. “The ring, Frodo,” he said with wild eyes. “Where--?”

Frodo blinked, but after a few seconds of thinking about it he remembered where he’d stored Bilbo’s ring and he handed it over to Gandalf in an envelope -- which Gandalf promptly dropped right into the fire.

“Gandalf...?” Frodo asked carefully. There was no way the fire in his grate was hot enough to melt gold, but the act was still alarming. Frodo hovered uncertainly by the fire place and hoped he’d get an explanation _this_ time.

Gandalf didn‘t answer his implied question. Instead, once it had been heated, he grabbed for the tongs. “Here. Hold out your hand,” he demanded.

Frodo did as he was told. Gandalf dropped the ring into Frodo’s palm, and it was -- well. It was a ring. Too cool for the fire it had just been in, but otherwise just a ring. Gandalf, however, looked away -- like it was a terrible temptation, somehow, best not looked at. Frodo had seen some old Hobbits view Esmerelda‘s carrot cake with that kind of expression, but it seemed well beyond the pale for a bit of gold.

“What can you see? Can you see anything?”

Frodo inspected it. “....No, nothing. There’s nothing.” He saw Gandalf’s shoulders sag, although with relief or disappointment he couldn’t say. Then, after a moment, Frodo did see something in the ring. “Wait. No. There are--” And, oh, it was coming up in the same precise and elegant script as he could feel on his thigh when he ran his fingers over it at night. The ring was heavy in his hand.

“Is that--” _some strange language derived from Valarin_ , he didn’t say. “Elvish? I can’t read it.”

He never could.

“There are few who can,” said Gandalf, grave and ominous. Around him, fire and shadow flickered on the walls, independent of any movement from the hearth. “The language is that of Mordor. I will not speak it here.”

Frodo’s mind went blank. Mostly with panic.

“M -- _Mordor_?” he repeated, swallowing.

“In the common tongue, it says this: ‘One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them’. This... this is the One Ring. Forged by the Dark Lord Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom, taken by Isildur from the hand of Sauron himself...”

Gandalf went on in this vein for some time, explaining the details of Gollum’s capture and how somehow despite him having somehow lost track of twelve rowdy dwarves they still considered Thranduil a good choice for keeping imprisoned important captives, but Frodo rapidly stopped paying attention.

Frodo’s soul mate was magic, busy, weird, definitely once some kind of angel and _the actual Dark Lord._

_The mark on his thigh matched the writing on Isildur’s Bane._

“--inane babble, they discerned two words: 'Shire’, and 'Baggins’.”

“Um,” said Frodo, tuning right back in at the sound of his name. “What?”

“They have enough to come here, Frodo. You must leave -- _now_. I will seek the counsel of the head of my order --”

Wait, what? “I have to leave?” he repeated. His soul mate was _the Dark Lord_. It was like a siren in his head, something wailing and loud that he couldn’t turn off. He couldn’t concentrate past it.

“You’ll have to leave the name of Baggins behind you, for that name is not safe outside the Shire --” Gandalf was shoving him into his coat. “I do not enjoy burdening you with this, my friend,” he said, clutching Frodo by the shoulders.

Frodo opened his mouth to say something intelligent, but -- _Soul mate. Dark Lord_. “Um,” said Frodo instead.

“Cut across country,” Gandalf advised kindly.

“...right,” said Frodo, gripping the walking stick that Gandalf had apparently found somewhere in his smial. It must have been Bilbo’s once.

Then there was a rustle at the window, and Gandalf hauled Frodo’s gardener inside and slammed him spine-first on the table.

The attention was all on Sam for a moment and Frodo took a second to collect himself.

Prosaically, Frodo thought that this explained quite well why his soul mate hadn’t wanted to tell Frodo his name. It wasn’t as though there were so many Saurons wandering about that you could get them confused with one another, was it? Not a common name, ‘Sauron’. Probably mothers didn’t go out of their way to name their children ‘the abhorred’.

“A good deal about a ring and a dark lord and something about the end of the world --”

Oh _dear_.

* * *

That night Frodo slept in the woods just outside of the Shire.

Or, well. He was supposed to. What actually happened was that he lay down in the dark with the moon shining high above him, Elbereth’s stars glittering like diamonds above the heavy clouds.

He couldn’t sleep. His mind was a mess. A whirl. A... problem.

He could feel the ring like a terrible heavy weight in his pocket.

He had too many feelings, and he was having them all at once.

He fell into a light doze eventually, and there was nothing in his dreams at all. His soul mate -- Sauron -- was busy elsewhere. Probably, Frodo thought a little hysterically, trying to find the Ring.

Definitely trying to find the Ring, as it happened, because Frodo woke in a cold sweat with the distinct sense of something stalking him from the darkness. Sam, equally awake and just as frightened, clutched at his arm and tried to breathe without giving them away.

There was the soft slithering sound in the dark, a cloak over rocks and roots. Something inhaled like it was trying to sniff them out, and distantly an owl hooted a warning before it fled.

Frodo swallowed.

He really didn’t want to bet on the monster in the dark letting him go just because he was its master’s soul mate. And even if that did work for him, it certainly wouldn’t help Sam.

But, oh. Sniff. _Slither_. It came closer --

And then there was _singing_.

Gildor Inglorion was a Noldo of uncommon beauty, which, considering the elves in general, was genuinely saying something.

He was dazzling to look at. The starlight shone down upon him and it gilded his dark hair and glittered in his eyes, and for the long hours of night that Frodo and Sam travelled with his company they were charmed and blessed. They sung as they walked tirelessly through the forest, and Frodo found himself joining in, even when he ought not to have known the words. There were things in him, wild, strange, buried things, that knew them already.

Their procession was like something out of a tale, something ancient made new again in the starlight. It was fitting, then, to learn that these elves were embarking on their journey to Mithlond, to the shipwright and the sea. They wandered Middle Earth for the last time.

The One Ring hummed happily in his pocket.

“I know not why he hunts you,” said Gildor at the edge of dawn, when the stars’ light was waning, “but I think you should run.”

“Yes,” said Frodo slowly. He found Gildor a significantly less fascinating conversationalist in the daylight, although no less compelling to look at. “That was sort of the plan.”

Gildor inclined his pretty head gravely and they parted ways.

“Elves,” said Sam in delight, which... was about the shape of it really.

Their night walking with the elves had been soothing in its way, and this time when Frodo slept, he fell easily into a dream shared with his soul mate. Certain choices were quite easy when they featured your soul mate.

“I’m a bit busy right now,” said his soul mate apologetically when he tried to get his attention. It was the same heavy presence, the same bell-like voice. He was exactly the same as he had been, only... now Frodo knew he was the Dark Lord. “Do you think --”

“I have your Ring,” Frodo interrupted. “Which is fine and all, I’m perfectly happy to return it, only I’d appreciate it if you didn’t send anybody to murder me in the mean time.”

There was a long pause. Somewhere there was the sound of clockwork.

“Well,” mused Sauron after a moment. “That certainly is convenient.”

It transpired that the Ring being half way across the planet was actually not that convenient, but that it being in Frodo’s possession certainly was. They considered and discarded the idea of simply giving it over to the wraiths: for one, giving it to the wraiths would put everybody on high alert, and it would certainly make getting across the mountains and down through Rohan and Gondor that much more difficult. And secondly...

“They have to bring it here to destroy it anyway,” Sauron said thoughtfully. “And they won’t dare have anybody of great power carry it. The temptation to use it would be too great. No. I think you should go along with their plans for now.”

“Right,” sighed Frodo. “So... to Bree, to meet Gandalf.”

“Oh,” said Sauron. “I don’t think Gandalf will be meeting you at Bree.”

Frodo couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see much of anything really, but he did get the distinct impression of a smile.

* * *

Merry and Pippin showed up just after noon, and Frodo could not for the life of him figure out how to get them to go away.

“There’s a quite high probability of dying,” he said loudly, over the conversation that was actually going on where Sam regaled them with tales of the elves.

Somehow Frodo yelling this at them didn’t discourage them in the slightest. He was forced to assume they weren’t going to be sent home.

The Old Forest was even worse than expected, sprawling and tangled with ample shadows for dark things to hide in. Chief of these dark things turned out to be a willow, which promptly tried to murder them all.

Rescue arrived in the form of a man with bright clothing and a wrinkled face, whose eyes shone with good humour and whose power over the Old Forest was disturbing in its completeness. He talked the willow down and cheerfully gathered the Hobbits up to stay with him.

“I thought you were just trying to get rid of us,” Pippin admitted.

“No,” said Frodo. “Not really.”

“I’ll never doubt you again,” said Merry fervently, peering around at the trees as though any one of them might leap out and grab them.

Their rescuer was a strange man named Bombadil. He wouldn’t stop singing, and it wasn’t the sweet tuneful songs of the ancient elves, either. It was an aggressively nonsensical, self-referential mess. Frodo smiled politely and thanked the man for his hospitality, but only because Primula would have expected it of him.

They stayed two agonising nights with the singing, dancing, chattering man. This was the inner limit of Hobbit etiquette, but even Pippin, who was the youngest of them all, was struggling to maintain his good cheer in the face of relentless singing.

“The wraiths _could_ come and get you,” said Sauron on the second night. “Technically. They’re not far, you know.”

“We’re definitely leaving in the morning,” Frodo said firmly, which then required that he explain the Hobbitish etiquette of hospitality to the Dark Lord, because apparently nobody else on Middle Earth (or, indeed, in Valinor) was civilised enough to have invented them yet.

Then, because things were going remarkably well for a change, Sauron allowed Frodo to look through his eyes for a while.

Mordor was... dry and blasted, covered with black volcanic ash. The slopes were steep and the ground was hot and cracked.

It was bleak and stark and _endless_.

“It’s surrounded on three sides by mountains,” Sauron explained, “so it’s extremely defensible, even if it’s a bit...”

“Ugly,” Frodo filled in.

“I could have a garden made, I suppose,” Sauron offered. “The ash isn’t bad for plants in itself -- it just blankets everything and there’s no oxygen for growing.”

“You want to build me a garden?” Frodo asked, delighted. It was the sort of question every tween Hobbit lass dreamt of being asked by her soul mate. Frodo was twice as old but he did find he wasn’t entirely exempt from the fluttering heart and flushed cheeks.

“They do seem to be quite important to your people. And,” his soul mate corrected. “I said I could _have it made_ , which is, I promise, quite different. I have something of a black thumb.”

“ _You want to build me a garden_ ,” Frodo crowed.

He woke in an obnoxiously good mood, and the only person who appreciated it was Bombadil.

At least they left the Old Forest behind them. That had to be worth something.

The day’s travel was fine, and they made good time into the Barrow Downs. That night Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin ended up wrapped in burial cloth and jammed in an ancient burial mound, so, no, actually, leaving the Old Forest behind them was really not as helpful as Frodo had hoped.

There were wraithlike wights and the smell of old damp stone, and the eerie green lights of the burial mound glinted ominously on the gold and jewels strewn around, and at least one of the wights was talking to itself, some skin-shivering incantation that made Frodo feel cold and ill.

That was when a ringwraith took its head off with  a sweep of its shadowy sword. The wight’s head hit the ground with a horrifying, bony _crack_.

“Oh,” said Frodo.

“Baggins,” said the ringwraith.

“Yes,” Frodo agreed nervously.

The ringwraith nodded, patted Frodo gently with one icy hand, and then peeled back the burial cloth before slinking away into the dark.

“Well,” said Frodo, eyeing his comatose companions. “At least I won’t have to explain that to you lot.”

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I know it doesn’t finish properly. That’s because my writing-imagination was way more extensive than my actual ability to sit down and write a thing in one sitting. I had plans, but the rules are quite clear, and it turns out that about seven and a half thousand words is my limit.
> 
> If there was something you particularly liked, let me know in a comment. :)


End file.
